Need to learn VB over the summer - need advice.

Joebob · 22 Jun 2017 at 10:17

I am currently teaching BTEC IT at a Sixth Form College and have set myself the challenge of learning to code over the summer hols. I am away in a remote area of Sweden for 4 weeks over the summer, with no or limited internet access, and will have with me my extremely portable but incredibly low powered Samsung 500T (Intel Atom 1.8GHz, 2GB RAM, Win10).

I am not new to coding, however the last languages I used were BBC Basic and C64 Basic so to say I am rusty would be to vastly understate things.

Anyway, I have bought an ebook for my Kindle (Learn Visual Basic in 8 hours - Visual Basic is what they currently teach where I work), However I am struggling to get an installation of VB working on my 500T - I installed Visual Studio 2017 Community Edition but it ran incredibly, painfully, excruciatingly slowly, so I then managed to find a copy of Visual Basic 2008 Express Edition but it wont run for some unknown reason!

I would just like to get a version of VB to run on my system so I can learn the basics - any help would or advice would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance.

Joebob · 22 Jun 2017 at 12:25

I couldn't find a version to download from MS as links always point you towards VS 2017, so I managed to find a download from another source (I didn't think this was too bad as the software is free anyway). I'm currently trying again with the install of 2017 and will see how I get on with that.

Joebob · 22 Jun 2017 at 14:50

Andre said:
Try SharpDevelop 4.4, I've used it on my Yoga 8" tablet without any problems

I have just had a quick look, does it cover VB as well?

Joebob · 22 Jun 2017 at 14:51

AHarvey said:
VB videos from Microsoft themselves via the Virtual Academy: https://mva.microsoft.com/en-US/tra...sic-fundamentals-for-absolute-beginners-16507

If you can'r run it locally, then are there any online IDE's for it?

VB.NET online IDE : https://dotnetfiddle.net/
VB Online : http://rextester.com/l/vb

I am sure there are others as well but that's just a quick google from me.

Might be the best option to get the basics down at least.

I won't have internet access where I am staying!

Joebob · 23 Jun 2017 at 10:56

Andre said:
Yes, it does. You can download a portable installation if you are unsure about installing it.
It is a pretty decent IDE, maybe not got the latest features of VS2017, but not bad.
Don't d/l Shardevelop 5 as this is c# only!

That works great, thanks

Joebob · 23 Jun 2017 at 11:35

Ok, so now I'm hitting problems again. The book I have is call "VISUAL BASIC: in 8 Hours, For Beginners" and just talks you through the code, so doesn't deal with any aspects of each IDE and setting up etc.

In SharpDevelop 4.4 I have started a new project and opened a new VB empty file which has then been saved as a .vb file. I have inputted the following code as the book told me to:

Module Module1
Sub Main()
Console.WriteLine("Hallo World!")
Console.ReadLine()
End Sub
End Module

I understand each of the above lines of code, but the 'Play' button within the IDE is greyed out and I don't know why?

[EDIT] Never mind, I sorted it - I didn't realise I needed to start a new 'solution' and then add a vb file to that.